The Practice of Poetry

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In the biography titled Picasso, Gertrude Stein laments, “the twentieth century has much less reasonableness in its existence than the nineteenth century, but reasonableness does not make for splendor” (49). In the twenty-first century, words like splendor make most people shudder with distaste. Our time’s practicality and “reasonableness” is unavoidable; the cost of simple living keeps most running the sidewalks back and forth day in and day out. But there must be a way to allay the reason with a little lightness, a bit more splendor. For I do believe such a thing exists. Thoreau would have labelled green beans a thing of splendor. Donne would have seen magnificence in a woman leaning against the rough bark of an oak tree. We have all the humble beauties that informed the poets of earlier times, it is just our vision is spotted with the distractions of modernity: gutters clogged with litter, abandoned couches on the curbside, debris on top of debris.

Somewhere, frogs are croaking boisterously, but through my window I hear the metro, interspersed with the acute noise of cats, fire-engines, and car alarms: commonplace distractions. But no more, perhaps, than Stein and Picasso had to contend with. Picasso found plenty of splendor; consider his painting, Jacqueline with Flowers. The way Picasso paints Jaqueline’s hair reveals an intricate loveliness, and her eyes do not have stars for irises on accident.

And yet, most of us, I’d wager, still hold back: we are used to being cynical. One must wonder, however, if our discomfort with these warm, amorphous concepts, such as “splendor” –and our natural inclination towards the more “reasonable” view of things, might be harming our art as well as our psyches? (Wouldn’t it feel good, after all, to use the word ”splendor” and truly mean it?) If a gruff and demanding woman like Gertrude Stein uses such big, soft words with aplomb, it makes one pause and at least reconsider.  

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